Date	Tip Caption	OS version	Experience
This month's selections
20041105	Odin & RealPlayer: These Work Well Together	Both?	General
20041113	WVGui: Play Streams From Radio Stations' Websites	Both	Intermediate
20050209	xFile Desktop Enhancement Utility	Both	General
20050228	eComStation WebPortal Announced	eCS	General
20050305	Adding eCS To A Windows Pre-loaded Machine	eCS	Advanced
20050313	Ghostscript And Printer Pak Drivers	Both	Intermediate+
20050314	XWorkplace: Folder Split-View	Both	General
20050315	StarOffice Spreadsheet Question Answered	Both	General
2000xxxx	Alt-Tab Switching Window	Both	Beginner
20050315	The Last Word	Both	General

(top)

---

Nov 2, 2004 - Odin & RealPlayer: These Work Well Together (Both?) (General)

Back in November 2004, "jp" complained (netscape.public.mozilla.os2):

I've read that Warpvision can play local Real Audio (.ram) files.

Where can I download such a file?
Does Warpvision's ability to play .ram files mean that I can use Mozilla to access them and launch WV as a plugin?

The lack of Real Player on OS/2 is a real PITA at the moment.

Doug Bissett:

I use RealPlayer 8, under ODIN (20020905 version; all later versions cause problems, for me, in one way or another). It works well, but I don't have it set up to work with a browser.

"jp" again:

It would also be handy to know which version of REAL Player is recommended.

Doug Bissett again:

eCS 1.0 came with ODIN from 20010531, which worked, as I recall. The RealPlayer that came with it was release 8, which also works.

I have updated to ODIN 20020905, which still works (I have had no luck with any newer version, that I tried), . . . and I still use RealPlayer 8. I haven't tried any newer versions, but I think there may be some issues.

(top)

---

Nov 13, 2004 - WVGui: Play Streams From Radio Stations' Websites (Both) (Intermediate)

YKE's playing catch-up here; a pretty good Tip that I couldn't include earlier.

In comp.os.os2.apps Dale Erwin wanted to know:

Well how do you get WVGui to play a stream from a radio station's web site? If I start WVGui, how do I direct it to the stream?

Al Savage told him how:

You have to acquire the URL of the stream, and pass it to WVGUI on the command line. To quote Al:

If you click the link, save the resulting file.
Inside the file is a pointer to another URL (via CGI).
Put that URL back into Mozilla, and save the resulting file again.
Inside of that file, you'll find the final URL: either a *.rm link or a streaming MP3 feed.
Feed the former (*.rm link) to RealPlayer or the latter (MP3 feed) to Warpvision.

(top)

---

Feb 9, 2005 - xFile Desktop Enhancement Utility (Both) (General)

Boris Kirkorowicz e-mailed YKE in German (trusting soul!), advising of an oldie-but-goodie WPS utility. An opportunity to dust off almost forgotten language skills!

The following is an edited loose translation of, and comments from, several emails:

xFile is a small WPS utility written by Michael Shillingford. Boris has used it for years, calls it the best of its kind he's ever seen, and finds it stable and problem-free. It's still carried by BMT Micro, where a shareware registration key may be had: BMT Catalog - xFile. Or get the unregistered version at Hobbes: Hobbes - xFile.

xFile replaces the standard "open/save as" file dialog, adding many features and functions. YKE finds it in the vein of the little add-ons/enhancements provided by others much more recently (Chris Wohlgemuth comes to mind). Try it--you may like it.

(top)

---

Feb 28, 2005 - eComStation WebPortal Announced (eCS) (General)

This should interest most eCS users. It's particularly important to YKE as inter alia we've lost that particular news feed after changing our ISP.

VOICE News had this, from Mike O'Connor:

Just saw the following posted by Bob StJohn on os2user[AT-sign]yahoogroups.com. You can try http://news.ecomstation.com/ I wasn't aware of this web-access myself until now.

"Newsgroups: ecomstation.announce
Subject: eComStation Web NewsPortal
Date: Feb 26 2005 19:51:11"

"Mensys and Serenity Systems International are glad to announce the availability of a webfrontend to the newsgroups on the eComStation newsserver. Users without a newsreader, or otherwise no means of accessing the newsgroups normally, can now browse and answer posts via a convenient webpage: http://news.ecomstation.com/
Best regards,
Joachim Benjamins"

YKE says "wa-a-y co-o-l!"

(top)

---

Mar 1, 2005 - Adding eCS to a Windows Pre-loaded Machine (eCS) (Advanced)

Really for both OSs, probably. But YKE has found enough installation differences between eCS and "ordinary" OS/2 to be cautious. Then too, certainly intermediate skills (or higher?) would be required--but this item surely also is of general interest.

Seems like everyone's concerned with getting eCS-OS/2 onto modern laptop computers--which these days most often are pre-loaded with WindowsXP. Turns out it's not that easy to do without messing up the system something awful.

Jan van Wijk, DFSee's author, tells us how to do it right [Reprinted from dfsee-support forum with Jan's permission]:

Just want to let you know I successfully changed my new Thinkpad T42 from a single 75GiB Windows + 4GiB recovery partition to a multiboot system with Windows in a 12GiB primary, IBM Bootmanager, eCS in a 1 GiB logical, several data partitions, and room for Linux. :-)

The Windows is the original (resized) Windows installation by IBM, so all the goodies that come with it are still there. I may post a more extensive scenario later on my website or on VOICE, but in short the steps I used were:

1. Made sure the system was NEVER booted before I got it, to prevent the automatic conversion of FAT32 to NTFS which would make resizing more difficult.

2. Boot with a DFSee CDROM, and resize the FAT32 primary to the desired size; I used 12 GiB, which was just a little more than the minimum possible. The NET contents of the partition is just 4.6 GiB, but is spread a bit over the start of the partition.

3. Let the system boot normally, allowing it to convert that partition to NTFS and initialize everything for normal use.

4. Using DFSee, add the IBM Bootmanager directly after Windows, and add Windows to its menu, then test if it still boots correctly.

5. Create a logical HPFS of 1.1 GiB and data partitions as desired, again using DFSee and create the required LVM information as well.

6. Boot the eCS installation CDROM (1.2) and install eCS. I used Easy install and let it install into the prepared logical. No real problems there. . .

7. Format the other (HPFS/JFS) data partition for use by eCS and copy data/applications over the network from my desktop machine

Hardware not supported (yet):
Out of the box all things work except the modem and the Intel 2200 wireless NIC.

Problems encountered:
Shortly after installing eCS 1.2 (probably caused/triggered by the install) the Windows installation failed to boot, with a black screen and cursor in the upper-left corner. I could not find a cause using DFSee diagnostic, checking BOOT.INI and hidden-sectors offset and so on. I then used a regular Windows-XP PRO installation CDROM to get to the recovery console, I used FIXBOOT as well as BOOTICFG and that fixed the problem.

After a few days of use (both Windows and eCS) this problem came back. . .

This time I made an image-dump of the Windows partition before fixing it, and only used the FIXBOOT from the Windows Recovery Console (which worked :-)).

Examining the differences before and after fixing I found that the 2nd sector of the partition, directly after the bootsector had changed. This is the 1st sector of the NTLDR file, which usually starts with a UNICODE signature value of 'NTLDR'. In this case that had changed to 'NTHDD' and about a hundred other bytes had changed near that as well.

So this does NOT look like random damage by eCS, but rather Windows itself deciding to change that and make itself unbootable. Perhaps it is caused by eCS messing with hardware settings or whatever. . .

Anyway, next time it happens I will try to restore just that one sector using DFSee and see if that fixes it too.

Otherwise I am quite happy with the new T42, with 1GiB of RAM and the 80GiB disk, it is more than 5 times faster than the A20p it replaced, and it is almost three times faster than the Celeron-1200 desktop system that I use for daily work :-). It is also smaller (14 inch 1024x768) and lighter than the A20p was.

The 1GiB memory is needed for SVISTA and VPC testing, as well as for Photoshop CS under Windows, since the Laptop doubles as Photo storage when I am on the road with my digital SLR too. . .

Jan van Wijk, author of DFSee; http://www.dfsee.com

(top)

---

Mar 13, 2005 - Ghostscript And Printer Pak Drivers (Both) (Intermediate+)

"Heiko" was having problems (comp.os.os2.apps) with Ghostscript and printer drivers:

I tried to import the ghostpdf.ppd into my installed ePDF PS driver (80.200):
     pin ppd z:\x\ghostpdf.ppd c:\os2\dll\PSCRIPT\pscript.drv

But all I get is

PostScript resource packaging utility version 1.00
Copyright (c) IBM Corp. 2000,2001. All rights reserved.

Producing Printer Device PAK
reading driver extended attributes
    success
    extended attributes read
    checking driver version: ok
    requiredfiles list: ok
    devicenames list: ok
    found 0 files to process
    ppd list initialized
    PAK table of contents initialized
initalize converter
    PPD converter initialized
READY, STARTING TO CONVERT
done: 0 devices converted, 0 failed
FINISHED, SHUTTING DOWN
done

I also tried with the original IBM PS driver 80.222 with the same result.
What am I doing wrong ?

Frank Wochatz set him straight:

It is not possible to import a PPD file to a PS driver which always ["already"? -yke] contains an imported PPD. If you want to add more than one PPD you have to import all PPDs in one task.

Here is a short step by step guide:

1. unpack the driver archive, e.g. to c:\driver\. Be sure to unpack a fresh, not for previous ppd-imports used archive.

2. copy the ghostpdf.ppd to the same directory

3. start:  pin.exe ppd c:\driver c:\driver\pscript.drv
   (I think this was your problem, you do not have to specify the ghostpdf.ppd, submit only the directory to pin.exe!)
   This should create the new driver including the auxprint.pak file.

4. Optional: if you have ePDF PS driver already installed, please remove the driver first. You will not need it anymore, and it is not possible to use both the ePDF PS Driver and the ghostpdf.ppd driver side by side. The GhostScript driver works as well or better than the ePDF PS driver, and it works fine with the ePDF main program.

5. Install the new GS driver--e.g. by double-cklicking on the pscript.drv--and drag the Ghostscript driver from the list and drop it to your your favorite desktop folder. The auxprint.pak file should be copied from c:\driver\ to c:\os2\dll\pscript\ automatically.

(top)

---

Mar 14, 2005 - XWorkplace: Folder Split-View (Both) (General)

Cristiano Guadagnino forwards this from xworkplace-user[AT-sign]netlabs.org, where the discussion was about getting the just-right view of folders in XWorkplace:

"Kev" needed to know:

I'm running eCS 1.2 with XWP 1.0.2. I love the Split View (for folders) and want to make it the default view for some folders--e.g. the drives folders. Does anyone know. . .?

1. Can I do this?
2. If so, how?
3. If not, I'd like to put it forward as a suggestion.

An unidentifiable respondent provided this answer:

Hold down the "Shift" key while clicking on "Split view" in the "Open" submenu. Works for the other views too, BTW.
This is an XWP extension, but I'm no longer sure I documented it anywhere.

(top)

---

Mar 15, 2005 - StarOffice Spreadsheet Question Answered (Both) (General)

Dushan Mitrovich's problem was with the StarOffice spreadsheet:

Sorry for asking this here, but I've a sudden need to use a spreadsheet (never used one before) and couldn't find the answer to this question in the docs.

I need to sum over all entries in a row, except that the columns that are either blank or contain a non-numeric entry should be ignored. There are functions that look like they could be used for this, such as ISNUMBER(), SUMIF(), COUNTIF(), etc. But I haven't figured out how to apply them for ranges of cells.

The Que 'Using StarOffice' manual is useless for this.

Peter Moylan thought this would work:

From memory, I think something like SUM(H1:H20) will work. The non-numeric entries will be interpreted as 0 in doing the sum.

But Dushan needed more:

Hmm, thanks, Peter. I need to get an average, too, not counting the non-numeric entries. So need to recognize which entry is numeric, and count only it for the denominator. Do you happen to recall a way of doing this?

Willy Steger answered that one:

AVERAGE(H1:H20) will do what you need. Non-numeric entries will be ignored.

There is a small tutorial online at http://www.functionx.com/starcalc/ that you could try for your first steps in the world of spreadsheets.

(top)

---

??? ??, 2000 - Alt-Tab Switching Window (Both) (Beginner)

A lot of "good stuff" can be mined from the often-neglected early years of OS/2. This Tip comes from a web-page bearing a 2000 copyright date: http://www.sundialsystems.com/articles/warp4feat.html. Check it out for more little goodies like this one.

Alt-Tab Switching Window:
This borrows a little from Windows 95: At an OS/2 windowed command line, hold down the Alt key and repeatedly press the Tab-key. For each Tab-key press, a small window opens in the center of the screen to display the title of an open window (which might be hidden).

When you see the application/window you want, release the Alt key. The desired window comes to the foreground.

(top)

---

Mar 15, 2005 - The Last Word (Both) (General)

The column's somewhat shorter this month. Not because there's less going on in the eCS-OS/2 world. Rather, dear readers, you aren't sending us much.

This is your column. Your ideas; your tips. YKE just edits what you send to tips@os2voice.org.

(top)